I have also tried <servername>:/ramdisk/home/dsl & replacing <servername> with the ip address. Also tried mounting exported directory on server (i.e. mount localhost:/home/dsl <mount_dir>) & still get the permission denied message.

On the client, do you have portmap and nfs-common started? On the client I sometimes have to set a static ip address for nfs to work without the permission denied thing. And that is regardless what distribution is running on the server or client.Also, on the server, /etc/hosts.allow may need to read like this, assuming your network is 192.168.0.0:

I have tried Jason's suggestion for hosts.allow & that doesn't change anything.

I did try loading portmap & nfs-common on the client - also modprobe nfs on the server. Again this didn't change anything. rpcinfo for the client (from either machine) gives an error (not at my 2 dsl machines at the moment, but it was something about rpc not being registered IIRC).

Haven't tried the static IP. Nonetheless - why can't I even mount exported directories on the same machine as they are exported from?

I have tried Jason's suggestion for hosts.allow & that doesn't change anything.

I did try loading portmap & nfs-common on the client - also modprobe nfs on the server. Again this didn't change anything. rpcinfo for the client (from either machine) gives an error (not at my 2 dsl machines at the moment, but it was something about rpc not being registered IIRC).

Haven't tried the static IP. Nonetheless - why can't I even mount exported directories on the same machine as they are exported from?

Try running"ps auxww | grep -i 'rpc'"

Does it return any processes for rpc.d or rpc.stat or rpc anything?

Edit: Try making sure both portmap and rpc.statd are running on the client. Then connect.

Also, did you run "/usr/sbin/exportfs -a"? It might show an error with the exports file syntax preventing things from working correctly.

Oh, and try running nfsd in the foreground, to see if you can catch any errors that might otherwise be sent to /dev/null.